Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  In the late 1920s, as many as fifty of these men established a mutual-assistance society to deal with their plight, setting up a headquarters in Üsküdar and exchanging information on new employment opportunities. Their old skills could be put to new uses. The harem, after all, had made them experts in propriety and politesse, and many of them spent the next several decades as museum guards, receptionists, ushers, and discreet maître-d’s at Istanbul’s leading restaurants. One of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s eunuchs, Nadir Aa, spent his days with retired imperial officials at the Café Lebon in Pera, speaking a painfully elegant version of Ottoman Turkish full of refined circumlocutions and interminable pleasantries. Even Mustafa Kemal reportedly employed a former imperial eunuch in his household in Ankara.

  Where sexual life more closely approximated Western fantasies was in the same place those fantasies were frequently realized in the West—in brothels. As part of the empire’s modernizing reforms under Abdülhamid II, an entire system of regulated brothels was introduced in 1884, replacing the informal houses and freelance prostitutes, both female and male, of earlier eras. In the past, prostitution had been seen as mainly a moral problem, one best dealt with via punishments meted out by Muslim kadıs (judges) or through raids and banishments organized by individual neighborhoods. Now it became a social issue to be legislated by the state. Brothels were henceforth to be operated only with a government-approved license, with regular inspections by police and health officials, and concentrated in neighborhoods that had been specifically zoned for the sex trade.

  This system disintegrated during the First World War. Refugeedom, foreign occupation, and desperate times combined to push women and, in some cases, children into sex work. Some were recruited by established brothel owners, while others were forced to solicit clients on the street, their oversize handbags and ribbon-covered parasols being the accepted trademarks of streetwalkers. One story—apparently true—told of a young Russian refugee who approached such a woman on the backstreets of Pera only to discover that she was both a former baroness as well as his mother.

  After 1918, Allied high commissions set about reestablishing a formal system of brothel licensing and inspections, essentially re-creating some of the legal framework that had decayed at the end of Ottoman power. The French, a bit too predictably, were assigned the task of overseeing licensed brothels. They demarcated those reserved for officers and for ordinary soldiers, fixed prices in all the establishments, and arranged weekly medical inspections by French doctors. The British took a different tack. At the YMCA, an Anglican vicar organized Sunday afternoon teas designed to distract the minds of enlisted men, while women from the English community were invited along for conversation and music. (The French system, one suspects, worked rather better.)

  Despite these efforts, Allied commanders were very much a product of their era when it came to the organization of sex. Regular sexual encounters for officers and men were seen to be a basic right as well as a useful tool for relieving boredom and maintaining morale. Especially for occupying armies—lodged far from home amid a tense and delicate political situation—providing opportunities for recreational sex was as much a part of a commander’s job as ensuring a steady supply of food and adequate equipment. The chief problem, however, was ensuring that Istanbul’s well-established industry of available sexuality did not at the same time weaken military units through illnesses acquired in the process.

  Venereal disease was “rampant,” General Harington reported during the occupation, and he estimated there were perhaps 40,000 prostitutes in Istanbul. A contemporary survey revealed a total of 175 brothels operating throughout the city, most concentrated in Pera and adjacent neighborhoods, with as many as 4,500 women employed there—nearly an order of magnitude smaller than Harington’s figure and probably closer to the truth. In another survey, police counted 2,125 registered prostitutes, with another 979 unregistered, although “the number of women whose moral condition has changed for a variety of reasons, can be said to be in the thousands.” The majority of both proprietors and prostitutes were Greek and Armenian, but it was estimated that Russians accounted for up to a quarter of the women working there. It was the occupiers, however, who were both the main clients as well as the major vectors of disease, even if plenty of Muslim men probably also availed themselves of the women’s services. A two-week snapshot of hospital records in 1919 showed Ottoman soldiers mainly suffering from typhus or smallpox, while British and French troops reported two cases of typhus, one of pneumonia, six of influenza, and eighty-four of gonorrhea and syphilis.

  Fortunately, there was a surfeit of doctors available to treat the problem, and their advertisements in the local press were a perfect reflection of the city’s multicultural kaleidoscope of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish professionals. From his offices in Kadıköy, Dr. Isaac Samanon promised to “treat all internal and venereal maladies using the newest discoveries of Science.” Drs. Mokin and Maxoud, situated in the Tünel Passage, specialized in venereal ailments as well as diseases of the skin. Dr. Ali Riza, a graduate of one of Paris’s finest teaching hospitals, received patients at his clinic off the Grande Rue. Dr. A. Schwartzer, late of Petrograd, relieved the distressed “according to the latest methods.” Dr. Yervant Tachdjian was available for consultations in Karaköy regarding syphilis, gonorrhea, and other genitourinary infections. Conveniently for many Allied officers, Dr. Djelal Chukri of the Clinique de Péra assisted with the treatment of venereal disease as well as female disorders at his clinic right across the street from the Pera Palace. Since the bar run by the sometime madame Bertha Proctor was just down Graveyard Street from Dr. Chukri’s office—a bar that employed women whose names are recorded in history only as Frying Pan, Square Ass, Mother’s Ruin, Fornicating Fannie, and Skinny Liz—it was possible for men and women to acquire a disease and be relieved of it on the same city block.

  Regardless of the realities of the sex trade in the early 1920s—relatively small, geographically concentrated, and focused in large measure on servicing Allied soldiers and sailors—the image of Istanbul as a haven for vice and venality only grew. Ernest Hemingway and other correspondents reported on the seediness of Pera, where the mewlings of street prostitutes enticed foreign sailors to their doom. Ziya Bey, who had had some experience in New Orleans, San Francisco, and other notorious port cities, was nevertheless scandalized by what Istanbul had become. “Intoxicated sailors rock from side to side and disappear in little streets,” he recalled, “where organs grind their nasal notes of antiquated French, Italian, yes, even American popular songs and where harsh feminine voices greet prospective friends in an international vernacular.”

  Observers were convinced that prostitution was only one part, although the most scandalous, of the continuing “white slave” trade in Istanbul. Forcible servitude had been common in the Ottoman Empire, even though the last open market for slaves, near the Grand Bazaar, had been closed down even before the abolition of slavery in the United States. In the new language of international law, however, outsiders came to decry the “trafficking” of women, a term invented at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a series of reports published in 1927, the League of Nations identified Istanbul as one of the major centers for the forced movement of women out of Europe and into the Near East. Women were being held against their will, the League said, with a wide network of brothel owners, shippers, and government officials complicit in the sex industry.

  The Turkish government repeatedly protested the charges, claiming that much of the recent increase in prostitution could be blamed on the economic plight of the itinerant Russians. The government pointed to the League’s own findings that any commerce in women seemed to begin and end in countries such as France and Egypt, with Istanbul serving only as an unfortunate pass-through. Even under the Ottomans, “white slavers” had been regularly deported from the city, and police records showed most of them inhabiting the slippery professional world at the intersection of music-making, saloon-keeping, ca
fé-owning, and brothel-running. Officials had listed one deportee’s job title, for example, as “pianist/pimp.” But the increasing international attention prompted republican officials to act more decisively. In 1930, a government directive prohibited the opening of new brothels and placed the administration of licensed houses under the care of the police. A round of raids and closings followed. The writer Fikret Adil dated the decline of Istanbul’s jazz scene to the initial shuttering of the free-form sex trade after the republic’s new edict, and he probably had a point—an analytical one if not a moral one.

  Three years later, the government backed away from an outright ban and issued a new directive that created a state bureaucracy to oversee the licensing, inspection, and regulation of brothels in the city. “Most of the people in our country are, in terms of culture, still quite primitive,” President Mustafa Kemal declared at the time. “The opening of brothels shall be permitted where necessary and according to law, and it is thus necessary that prostitutes be regulated.” The venues that were blessed as the new sites of acceptable vice were largely in the same places as during the Allied occupation, a fact that deepened the divisions between the old city south of the Golden Horn and Pera to the north. Travelers from Evliya Çelebi forward had taken for granted that the former was the domain of propriety and Islamic virtue while the latter was the realm of experiment and abandon. Rather than knitting together the former imperial capital, the new republic’s drive to modernize social and sexual life actually reinforced the canyon separating the two worlds on both sides of the water. Having a part of the city where anything goes had served the Ottomans well, and in a newly modernizing republic, Pera was beginning to play an even greater role as both the designated red-light district and the avant-garde of popular culture.

  That connection certainly continued into the interwar years and beyond. The mutual parasitism of nightlife and vice was in essence little different in Istanbul from that in any large city. To anyone expecting a certain version of Islamic propriety in a country overwhelmingly Muslim by religion and cultural orientation, the enduring affection in Turkish popular culture for Istanbul’s drag queens, its famous madames, and its professional roués can come as a shock. Even today, family-friendly eateries share alleyways with transvestite prostitutes who toss down joking hellos from the windows of their second-story aeries.

  Pious Turkish Muslims, by contrast, came to see the source of Istanbul’s loose behavior and pragmatic ethics as, in one form or another, aliens—at first the occupying Allies, then the refugee Russians, then the local Christians and Jews who, despite the shift in property ownership toward Muslims, still staffed the gin joints and cabarets north of the Golden Horn. Turkish nationalists tended to share that view, seeing Istanbul as a “Byzantine whore”—a common label for the city—that had offered itself up to the occupiers while patriots were dying to save the rest of the country from the Hellenes.

  But an underground transformation was happening as well. The very values that many Istanbullus had long taken for granted—a certain cultural openness; an ability to embrace religious conviction and moral license at the same time; and a belief that modernity actually demanded a tolerance for raunchiness—were being written into the informal codes of public behavior then emerging in republican Turkey. In fact, unlike in the past, when the business of public entertainment had been dominated by European performers or down-and-out Russians, a new generation of native Istanbullus was emerging to record the city’s darker side in song.

  “THE PAST IS A WOUND IN MY HEART”

  Istanbul jazz: A four-piece band, probably in the 1920s, with the female vocalist using a megaphone, a typical amplification device of the period.

  THERE IS NO WELL-DEVELOPED field of study called sonic history, but the changes in the audible world would have impressed themselves on anyone living in Istanbul in the interwar years. The first automobile in the city’s history had been exhibited in a showroom window on the Grande Rue during the reign of Abdülhamid II and attracted crowds of spectators for months, but now the vroom and sputter of motorcars filled the streets and alleyways. A trolley clanged its way up the Grande Rue. A horn announced the approach of a pilot boat on the Bosphorus. A train screamed as it came around the bend toward Sirkeci station. The low buzz of an airplane’s propeller droned overhead.

  “At Pera, where I live, a perfect inferno of music is let loose from sunset until two o’clock in the morning,” said Marthe Bibesco, a Romanian princess and society maven. She watched weary-faced men and women drag themselves beneath the gaslights from bandstand to bandstand like a flock of sheep. Rival concerts were struck up downhill on the appropriately named Tomtom Kaptan Street, while phonographs wailed from open windows and organ-grinders passed by on the street below. As the night wore on, shouts drifted up from the harbor when sailors were bounced out of bars and made their way back to ship.

  Istanbul was, in a way it never had been before, loud. Music spilled from clubs. The sirens of ambulances, military automobiles, and fire engines—a novelty introduced during the Allied occupation—shrieked and howled. “They exasperate and deafen,” said an editorial in the Orient News in 1919, “but they are probably not so effective in clearing the way as the ordinary horn.” Messages and annoyances that had been delivered by the naked human voice—the curses of a frustrated hamal or the insistent solicitations from a vendor in the Spice Bazaar—competed with sounds made from afar and conveyed through new technologies. It was now possible for Istanbullus to feel themselves intimately acquainted with people they had never met.

  That change was evident in an industry that genuinely took the city by storm in the 1920s. Movies had been screened since the turn of the century, but they were mainly time-fillers between stage acts, one-reel shorts that could be cast on a wall or a makeshift screen while actors were changing costumes or assembling in the wings. Istanbul had its own well-established street theater and an indigenous form of kinetic art, the famous Karagöz, in which a puppeteer cast the shadows of flat, semitransparent figures onto a backlit screen. Especially popular during Ramadan and other holidays, Karagöz held its own against film until the First World War, when the first permanent movie venue—little more than a converted coffeehouse, in fact—opened opposite the British Embassy off the Grande Rue. In short order, the city’s elite politicians, businessmen, and military figures came out to see first-run films, often imported German or French productions. Men and women were kept chastely separate by a partition, but mixed crowds became more common during the occupation years. The venues were still rough coffeehouses that might double as bars and were generally unsuited to the genteel public. “There are a lot of ‘movie’ shows,” reported Billy Fox-Pitt, the Welsh Guardsman, “but they all look pretty bug-ridden!”

  Proper cinemas soon sprang up around the city, however. Istanbullus could see French, Italian, and American films, distributed by companies such as Fox, Paramount, and MGM, at any number of often ornate and inviting establishments—the Melek, the Alhambra, the Magic, the Artistique, or the enormous Glorya, seating 1,400 people and opened in November 1930. By the beginning of that decade, the city had thirty-nine cinemas offering both silent films and talkies.

  The huge popularity of imported films—and the lucrative job of distributing them—meant that developing a local film industry took time. The first talkie in Turkish, On the Streets of Istanbul, appeared in 1931, created by the firm that would become one of the principal film producers in the early republic, the pekçi brothers. Migrants from Salonica, the five brothers had owned a prominent department store in the Eminönü neighborhood before moving into the cinema business. On the Streets of Istanbul was crude, a romp about two men in love with the same woman, and it owed its soundtrack to Paris, where the film was produced, but its popularity did help finance a new Istanbul-based company. Two years later, pek Film debuted its first locally produced talkie, A Nation Awakes. Directed by Muhsin Erturul and with a score by the noted composer Muhlis Sabahattin, the film w
as a hyperbolic account of the occupation period, with Senegalese infantrymen molesting Muslim girls and Allied soldiers bayoneting Turks in their beds. For the first time, Istanbullus, and Turkish citizens in general, could see a sound-enhanced version of their own recent history flashing before them on the screen. Its impact on popular memory was immense. When later generations of Muslim Istanbullus looked back on the occupation, the uninvited gropings of French African soldiers became a common refrain, even though few people of the era probably ever encountered a Senegalese rifleman at all.

  As in other parts of the world, film was emerging as an important medium for communicating exactly the messages that states wanted to get across—the duty of patriotism, the lineaments of civic virtue, the demands of national loyalty—but audiences inevitably voted with their pocketbooks. Tickets were reasonably expensive, as much as a quarter of an ordinary laborer’s daily wage, so visits to the cinema had to be worthwhile. Distributors seemed to understand that Istanbullus preferred exactly the same kind of content as their counterparts in western Europe and the United States. A detailed survey of first-run films in the summer of 1932 revealed the range of Istanbul’s viewing preferences: 96 percent of films showed characters using alcohol, 74 percent had a plot concerned with wealth or luxury, 70 percent centered on a love affair, 67 percent had actresses clad in suggestive clothing, 52 percent showed passionate romance, and 37 percent featured sexy dancing. Most of the movies—63 percent—were also determined to have an implausible plot.